End of weekend Progress Report

Figure I should make a better effort to do something like weekly updates on how I'm doing on the progress of getting everything up and working again. Was only a couple days since the last post, but a post after the end of each weekend sounds nice, so whatever...
This'll mostly be me rambling, so there'll be a big TL:DR at the end for those that want the key points.

Anyway, I may have been going a little hard over the weekend as I kinda messed up my sleep schedule a bit. Long couple of nights so far as I dove into what I needed to do to get my most complicated patch, The Dynamic Transformation Engine, working again. Looks like the game changed a few of the things I used before to get info I needed about the player data such as the player race, the partsets they use for base form, which player slot the character is loaded into, ect. My previous version of the patch is honestly quite messy so I decided the best course of action is just to toss it all out and start over from the beginning as it would most certainly be way faster than trying to frankenstein my old code to work with the new game version, especially since I lost a lot of my old notes about the game pointer offsets and such when my SSD died earlier this year...
As of writing this it is currently about 7am and I've been awake for a few hours now thinking of new ideas of how to get the data I need, and I think I finally have a plan for what to do.
I don't have a fully working patch yet, but so far things look very promising. Early checks and tests show that my new way of getting things is consistent and should work in Offline VS, Photo Mode, Offline Quests, and Story Mode. Going to have a friend help me later to check if the data stays consistent when starting an online match. If things go well then I can proceed to the bulk of the patch that is actually getting the game to search for and load the partsets dynamically. It's still a bit early to say, but if things are fine then this will probably end up being the cleanest and most optimized version of the patch yet. Functionally it'll be exactly the same to ya'll, but internally there was a lot of bulk and redundancy I was able to carve away which really makes me happy. Nothing hits quite like being able to write cleaner code...
I've also gotten requests here and there to get the patch working for cast characters. It's definitely on my to-do list, but will have to be looked into after I'm done with the base CaC version. The short of it is that the game loads partset data differently for cast characters so I can't just hook what I'm currently doing and make it work for them. Basically it'll have to be a new patch.

In terms of my other stuff, the only other things I've done was take a quick look at the new shaders 1.26 added to make notes on what exactly I need to do. It really seems that the only new one that was added was the official scrolling shader that Fu and Goku use for their new forms. In theory I don't actually need to do any real updates to my shaders and everything will already work as-is. That's a bit lazy and I want to at least incorporate the official code the devs use in their scrolling shader to use in my own. It'll most likely be less buggy and look a bit better as I had to do a couple weird work arounds in my code.

I want to also go back and fix other tools I made such as the CUS Editor and Super Soul Editor. I'm pretty sure I found and recovered the source code for both of them, but they will have to be after I finish up everything for my patches and shaders.

TL;DR:
I'm working on the Dynamic Transformation patch first and redoing it from scratch so it'll take a bit more time but things are looking pretty good so far. I want to have it work for cast characters too, but the game loads things differently for them so it'll probably have to be a new patch.
No progress yet on my other patches other than quick looks for taking notes for what needs to be done.
I want to update my tools such as the super soul editor, but those will come after everything else. I don't want to keep people waiting for things like the new Cel-shaders and whatnot.

Once again thank you to those who have been supporting me. The money has for sure helped me more than once already when it comes to keeping my pc functional. Computer parts are still really up there in price so it really is appreciated.
If anyone has any questions or ideas they may want me to look at in the future let me know. I'm currently occupied with updating things at the moment, but I do like to keep a note of requests and such if they sound interesting. XV3 may be on the way now, but XV2 still has a pretty good hold on my interests. I'm not gonna abandon it now just because 3 is on the horizon. (though I probably will want to spend a few weeks with it to see how it is, both in gameplay and in modding ability)

Anyway yap session over, thanks again and bye for now